The Steam Deck has revolutionized the gaming handheld market. With the Linux-based immutable SteamOS, Valve has fostered an active community developing mods and alternative systems for this platform. Other manufacturers distribute Windows-based mobile consoles. However, time and time again it has been shown that they lag behind Linux in terms of software support.
But how easy is it to bring a Linux distribution, say openSUSE, to the Steam Deck?
In this talk, a prototype based on openSUSE’s open technologies and infrastructure will be presented, which is already (almost) fully functional on the Steam Deck and many other devices.
I personally found it kinda jank. Mint feels best for a laymans gaming distro ime
good if they’re gaming on old hardware I am sure. Mint lacks modern feature enablement and it baffles me that people keep recommending it
Can you elaborate, please?
Mint is a long term support distro using an in house custom desktop environment. LTS distros don’t receive kernel or mesa updates as often so game performance can be lacking especially for newer games and/or newer hardware. Cinnamon also lags behind on modern desktop features compared to GNOME or KDE Plasma.
Is 5600x 6700xt considered old? Worked fantastic out of the box for all of my friends and family.
It’s gotta be a bunch of laptop users or some shit
Nah, I’m on latest hardware (4080) and did a bunch of tests recently. Mint was the best along with PopOS. A lot of distros like CachyOs or Bazzite have a lot of great enhancements but they break so often without easy rollbacks that a layman shouldnt use them. Mint has a driver manager and can install KDE if you want with no breakage. Bazzite and CachyOS couldnt even run many major titles due to driver breakage and not having an easy way for a layman to rollback. (I could do it, though a layman would hate it). Whereas PopOS and Mint both ran major titles without any configuration.
I don’t know of any ‘bleeding edge’ distros with driver managers, I might ask about that though.
What about nobara? I’m currently using Mint but considering Popos. Any advice? I just want whichever distro works out of the box with no tweaking. I’m the type to just wanna turn on and play. I have to reinstall my mint due to tweaking which I did myself. Advice?
Have you considered Bazzite? Similar to Nobara, but it’s immutable. You can treat it like an appliance and even updates itself
Thanks. I actually played around on bazzite. I really like KDE and its the one thing I wish mint had, because it seems if you go tweaking too much icons and extensions in mint it gets buggy and shit stops working as smooth. But I got aggravated when I needed to create a bootable USB and couldn’t figure out how in bazzite. In mint you simply right click the file and click make bootable USB or whatever it says. I love mint. I reinstalled mint on a family members PC because they had my tweaked till I broke it copy. It just works out the box for all our games. Programs are easy to find and labelled so you know what they are unlike bazzite. Its much more refined and polished. Simple. LM for the win! Not knocking bazzite but it seems like a too new unrefined distro. IMO.
My notes said I tried nobara but they werent very detailed, I assume it wasnt great? Manjaro is one of the ones I didnt test, along with Garuda. I tried Fedora base and Arch base and they didnt work out of the box with most games.
My wallpaper and lock screens reset every time I restart. It borked my dual boot and now when I boot in the boot menu I have Fedora and Bazzite. No more windows. I still see it in the partition so I guess I just got to recover my windows. The install was a pain in the ass getting an error every time. So far on install I had to remove my old Linux mint EFI and rewrite a new one for bazzite. Gaming has worked no issues but its not been the smoothest transition. I kept getting an error code fatal error message. Had to terminal in to fix it before it would install. Had I known it was gonna be this much of an issue id have reinstalled mint which is a breeze just plug and click.